Belief Systems Today

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Belief systems todayDonald R. Kinderaa Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

To cite this Article Kinder, Donald R.(2006) 'Belief systems today', Critical Review, 18: 1, 197 216To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08913810608443657URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08913810608443657

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Donald R. Kinder

BELIEF SYSTEMS TODAY

ABSTRACT: My purpose is to offer an assessment of the scientific legacy ofConverse's "Belief Systems" by reviewing five productive lines of researchstimulated by his authoritative analysis and unsettling conclusions. First I re-count the later life history of Converse's notion of "nonattitudes," and suggestthat as important as nonattitudes are, we should be paying at least as muchattention to their opposite: attitudes held with conviction. Second, I argue thatthe problem of insufficient information that resides at the center of Converse'sanalysis has not gone away, and that newly fashioned models of informationprocessing offer only partial remedies. Third, I suggest that the concept of the"average voter" is a malicious fiction, as it blinds us to the enormous variationin political attention, interest, and knowledge that characterizes mass publics,in Converse's time as in our own. Fourth, I develop an affirmative aspect ofConverse's analysis that has mostly been overlooked: namely, that if ideologicalreasoning is beyond most citizens' capacity and interest, they migh t fall backon a simple and reasonable alternative, which I will call "group-centrism."And fifth, I consider the possibility that while the majority of individual citi-zens falls short of democraticstandards, thepublic as a whole might do ratherwell.

If democracy means rule by the people, then in today's worlddemocracy is widely endorsed in principle but rarely realized in prac-tice. At most there are,here and there, instances of indirect democ-Critical Review 18 (2006), nos. 1-3. ISSN 0891-3811. www.criticalreview.com. 2006 Critical Re-view Foundation.Donald R. Kinder, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,M I 48106, drkin der@ um ich.ed u, thanks Jeffrey Friedman for excellent editorial advice.

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198 Critical Review Vol.18, Nos. 1-3racy, where con trol over governm ent decisions is constitutionallyvested not in the people themselves but in officials chosen by thepeople. Under indirect democracy, citizens select those who actuallygovern; express judgment on the performance of government; andoffer, from time to time, recommendations on what policies shouldbe adopted next. If this attenuated form of democracy fails to mea-sure up to the mental picture we carry around of ancient Athens orthe New England town meeting, it still leaves contemporary citizenswith important things to do. How well do they do them? To whatextent should we expect citizens to provide wise decisions, goodjudgment, and sensible advice on matters of politics?For more than forty years now, the single best answer to this ques-tion has been supplied by Philip Converse's extraordinary essay, "T heNature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics." As readers of this volumeknow, Converse concluded that qualitative, perhaps unbridgeable dif-ferences separated the political thinking of elites from the politicalthinking of ordinary people. Most Americans, in Converse's judg-ment, were incapable of following, much less actually participating in,democratic politics.Not everyone agreed. In short order, Converse's essay set off ahuge scholarly commotion.1 The most compelling line of criticismdirected at "Belief Systems"or so it seemed at the timewas thatConverse had ignored politics: his analysis had paid too little attentionto the nature of elite discussion. According to this interpretation, thelack of sophistication displayed by citizens under Converse's micro-scope mirrored the unsophisticated public debate to which the publicwas treated at the time. Provide Americans with a more thoughtfuland high-minded politics, so ran the argument, and they would beperfectly capable of responding in kind.On this point, the critics appeared to have time on their side.Surely Converse's conclusions reflected, in part, the comparativelytranquil Eisenhower years, a period of political recovery from the in-tense ideological debates of the New Deal and from the collectivetrauma of economic depression and world war. Surely his originalclaim must be modified, given the events that had shattered nationaltranquility in the intervening years.Not really, as I read the evidence. Over time, Converse's claim ofideological naivete stands up wellboth to transformations in poli-tics, and to a broad array of challenging analysis. After all the boister-ous events and ideological debates visited upon American politics

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in te rm itte n tly over the last 40 years, and after all the ofte n-unfriendly scholarly attention "Belief Systems" attracted, the originalclaim survives largely intact. Just as Converse would have it, when itcomes to politics, most citizens are ideologically innocent: indifferentto standard ideological concepts, lacking a consistent outlook onpublic policy, in possession of genuine opinions on only a few issues,and knowing damn little.2Does this mean that there is nothing more to say; that the questionof whether citizens are up to shouldering the demands of democracyis settled? No. To the contrary, one measure of forward momentumin scientific disciplines is programmatic investigation of old questionsformulated in new and ever-finer ways, and something resemblingthis has been taking place on the subject of democratic competenceor so, at least, I will try to show here.

Attitudes, Weak and StrongConverse claimed that on any particular issue of broad political im-portance, the public could be partitioned into one of two groups: thefirst made up of citizens who possess genuine opinions and holdonto them tenaciously; the second and much larger group composedof citizens who are quite indifferent to the issue in question andwho, when pressed, either confess their ignorance outright or, out ofembarrassment or misplaced civic obligation, invent an attitude onthe spotnot a real attitude, but a "nonattitude." Converse ([1964]2006, 51) concluded that sizable fractions of the public "do not havemeaningful beliefs, even on issues that have formed the basis for in-tense political controversy among elites for substantial periods oftime."

Nonattitudes are embarrassing for advocates of democracy. Theirpresence implies that people don't know what they want from gov-ernment. If Converse is right about nonattitudes then, as ChristopherAchen (1975, 1227) once put it, "Democratic theory loses its startingpoint."For two reasons at least, the case for nonattitudes seems evenstronger now than when Converse introduced the idea. First of all,surveys have continued to show that, from one interview to the next,citizens in impressively large numbers wander from one side of a pol-icy question to the other (e.g., Converse and Markus 1979).3 The

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second reason comes from evidence on the stability of elite opinion.Converse launched his inquiry with an interest in whether politicalleaders and publics were equipped to talk intelligibly to one another.His answer was no, but he actually provided rather little evidence onelites, and no evidence at all on the temporal stability (as opposed tothe inter-issue consistency at any given time) of their views. Now,however, we know that political elites hold onto their political beliefsmuch more resolutely than do common citizens (Converse andPierce 1986; Jennings 1992; Putnam 1979). This suggests that non-attitudes primarily reflect the low information and casual attentionthat citizens ordinarily bring to politics, much as Converse originallysuggested.

Does this mean that people who express nonattitudes have nothingto say? Not necessarily. John Zaller and Stanley Feldman (1992) arguethat nonattitudes reflect not so much ignorance as confusion. Theytake as their point of departure the premise that the American politi-cal mind is teeming with potentially relevant considerations. Citizensdo not know what to think, Zaller and Feldman suggest, because theycannot adjudicate among the various competing considerations thatcome to mind. In a clever study, they show that many Americans cangenerate justifications both for favoring and for opposing prominentgovernment policies, and that such ambivalence is associated with in-stability in their opinions (cf. Hill and Kriesi 2001).Suppose Zaller and Feldman are correct. Suppose nonattitudes arereal, but no t deeply considered; real, but unstable. W hat are govern-ment officials to make of advice composed disproportionately ofsuch fragile attitudes? Does the Zaller and Feldman interpretation ofnonattitudes make less trouble for democratic theory than did Con-verse's original view?Perhaps. If in fact Americans have lots of things in mind out of

which they might construct opinions, then whether or not they actu-ally succeed in doing so might depend on whatever help they receivefrom others about how issues should be defined and understoodorin the contemporary idiom, about how issues are "framed."Political elites are constantly engaged in efforts to define issuestheir way. At the heart of such rhetorical efforts is a frame"a cen-tral organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfold-ing strip of events, weaving a connection among them. The framesuggests what the controversy is about, the essence of the issue"(Gamson and Modigliani, 1987, 143). In effect, frames operate as

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"opinion recipes": advice from elites about what ingredients, in whatproportions, should be combined to form a good opinion.Insofar as elites provide useful frames, citizens should be morelikely to develop real opinions. And, in fact, they seem to do so. In aseries of experimental demonstrations across a variety of issues, citi-zens are more likely to express an opinion when they are providedwith helpful frames. Moreover, in the presence of such frames, opin-ions are more stable over time and better anchored in the material in-terests and political commitments that the frames appear to highlight(e.g., Kinder and Nelson 2005; Kinder and Sanders 1996; Snidermanand Theriault 2004) .4

The nature, prevalence, and improvability of non-attitudes are im-portant to democratic politics, but so too are real attitudeswhich Iwill call, borrowing from Robert Abelson (1988), attitudes held with"conviction." Conviction distinguishes between opinions we trulyown and those we merely borrow. As Converse's original analysissuggested, conviction is not very common, but when citizens reallyown their beliefs, when they think clearly and care deeply about anissue, they are much more likely to take part in politics. The effectsare substantial and surprisingly general. Having conviction energizes abroad repertoire of political action, from persuading others to votefor a favorite candidate, to joining an organization, to working in apolitical campaign (Burns and Kinder 2005).

5Conviction is importantreal attitudes are importantbecause ac-tion is important. Participation in matters of government and politics isthe lifeblood of a democratic society, and those who take an active partin politics are more likely to influence what government chooses to dothan are those who sit on the sidelines. W hich issues appear on theagenda (and which do not), and how those issues speak to people (or

fail to), have consequences for whose opinions are ultimately heard inthe halls of power.

Insufficient InformationFor critics of democracy, the claim that common citizens don't knowenough has been a persistent and powerful weapon. Those opposedto the spread of democratic practice at the time of the AmericanRevolution argued that the ordinary person simply lacked the infor-




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mational wherewithal to offer any useful advice about national policy.As Converse (1990, 369) put it,

Good decision making requires good information. And while thecommon citizen might be expected to be a fair judge of matters closeto his or her ken, such as how a minister's pay was best raised or howmuch repair must be done on the local bridge, good informationabout national and international affairs was exacdy what most citizens,preoccupied by their daily subsistence rounds, conspicuously lacked.

Compared to their Revolutionary-era predecessors, today 's com-mon citizens are affluent, well educated, and virtually bombarded bynews of the wider world. Good decisions still require good informa-tion, however, and good information, according to Converse, thinsout very rapidly in mass publics. His skepticism about the limited rea-soning powers citizens typically apply to politics follows in a directand immediate way from how modestly citizens invest in politics and,as a consequen ce, ho w little they know .And how little do they know? Consider this example. Shortly aftertaking office, and then again in 2003, President Bush proposed andCon gress passed tw o of th e largest tax cuts in U.S . history. T h e 2001legislation alone will likely cost the federal treasury a staggering $2trillion through 2010, w ith m ore tha n a third of the reduc tion goin gto the richest 1 perc ent o f Am erican s. A nd yet surveys taken du rin gthis per iod revealed that most Americans admitted that they hadnever heard anything about the el imination of taxes on corporatedividends, a central provision of the president's 2003 tax proposal;roughly half of the American public believed that "most families" payfederal inheritance taxes (the correct answer is less than 2 percent);and when offered the opportunity, many Americansa near major-ityconfessed that they really hadn't thought enough about the pres-ident 's tr ill ion-dollar tax proposals to develop an opinion (Bartels2005; Kind er, B urn s, and Vieregge 2005).

There is nothing unusual about this example. Across time, space,and d om ain , "levels of inf orm atio n ab ou t pub lic affairs are, from th epoint of view of the informed observer, astonishingly low" (Con-verse 1975, 79; D ell i C ar pi ni and Ke ete r 1996; P ric e and Za llerI993)-6This conclusion, however, may not be as democratically disheart-ening as it first appears. One reason to think so is supplied by Milton

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Lodge and his colleagues, who argue that citizens know more thanthey can tell. Not to worry if citizens often cannot summon up basicfacts about candidates when asked to do so, Lodge says; such dem on-strations do not prove that citizens are staggering around in the dark.This conclusion follows as an implication from Lodge's principal pro-ject, which is to specify "the main architectural and procedural fea-tures of a psychologically realistic model of the candidate-evaluationprocess" (Lodge 1995, i n ) .

In this pursuit, Lodge takes inspiration from the information-processing approach to human cognition, drawing heavily on a modeldeveloped by R eid Hastie in particular (Hastie and Park 1986; Hastieand Pennington 1989). Lodge's central po int is that over the course ofa campaign, citizens develop their impressions of the candidates "on-line": not, that is to say, by consulting the Internet, but by integratingnew information into an ongoing overall impression. Campaigns de-liver messages; citizens sometimes notice them; as they do, theyrapidly draw out the political implications of the messages, if any;they thereupon integrate these implications into their summary eval-uations of the candidates; commit their now-updated overall evalua-tions to long-term memory; and then (here is the crucial point forpresent purposes) quickly forget the details that prompted the updat-ing in the first place. An implication of the on-line model is that citi-zens should be judged not by the information they can recalla testmost citizens flunkbut by the kinds of information they entertain,and how ably they integrate such information into their ongoingevaluations.

The on-line model is psychologically realistic, it accounts for pat-terns of evidence in judgment and memory that alternative modelscannot, and its application to candidates and campaigns is supportedby a series of well-designed experiments (e.g., Lodge and Steenber-gen 1995). In many respects, this is an exemplary case of public-opinion research putting to excellent use basic models and conceptsdeveloped in cognitive psychology. Lodge intends his model to applyonly to a particular settingnamely, voters developing evaluations ofcompeting candidates as a campaign unfoldsbut it is an importantsetting. All this is very much to the good.The implications of the on-line model for the problem we arewrestling with here are not altogether clear, however. First of all, no-tice that the model is agnostic on what kinds of information voterstake into account. Are they paying attention to the candidate's posi-




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tion on the national debt, his vivacious wife, his excellent posture, hispale skin what? W e need to kno w m ore ab out wh at kinds of infor-mation voters are picking up and integrating into their evaluations.

Moreover, even if voters were paying attention to high-grade in-formation, and even if they were perfectly responsive to such informa-tion, the o n-lin e m od el wo uld leave them w ith n oth ing to say. T he irpreferences would be informed, but their amnesia about the informa-tion that led them to their preferences would disqualify them fromparticipa ting in po litical de bate. If d em ocr acy is, at least in part, go v-er nm en t by discussion (G uttm ann and T ho m ps on 1996), and polit icsan arena "where public goals and policies are debated and politicalcho ices mu st b e publicly justifie d" (S toker 1992, 370), the on -lin emodel cannot supply an altogether satisfying solution to the norma-tive pro ble m posed by insufficient info rm ation .

A no the r line of attack on th e prob lem of insufficient inform ation,w hic h has gathered steam in recent years, concedes w idespread publicignorance of polit ics but concludes that many citizens may neverthe-less m ud dle thro ug h. H ow ? By re lying on a var ie ty of cogni t ivesho rtcu ts, or "he uristics." H euristics are "strategies of simplificationthat redu ce the co m plexity of ju dg m en t tasks, to mak e them tractablefor the kind of mind that people happen to have" (Kahneman, Slovic,and Tv ersky 1982, xii). T he y are, as R ich ard N isbett and L ee R oss(1980, 18) pu t it, "a n inev itable feature of t he cognitive apparatus o fany organism that mu st make as ma ny jud gm en ts, inferences, and d e -cisions as humans have to do."

One such heuristic is to take cues from well-informed or at leastbetter-info rm ed sources. A terrific dem onstration of this poin t is p ro -vided by A rthu r Lupia (1994), w ho showed that California voters w h oknew little about the details of various complicated proposals to reformthe automobile insurance industry in their state nevertheless madechoices that were indistinguishable from those made by well-informedvoters. All the generally ill-informed voters really needed to know waswhich proposals were backed by which interest groups. For example,when Californians knew that the insurance industry itself was behind aparticular proposal, they knew enough to vote against it. More gener-ally, by takin g cues from ex pe rt sources party elites (Brody 1991),new s organizations (Iyengar and Kind er 1987), op in ion leaders (Katzand Lazarsfeld 1955), interest g rou ps (Lupia 1994) citizens can " beknowledgeable in their reasoning about political choices without nee-

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essarily possessing a large body of knowledge about politics" (Snider-man, Brody and Tetlock 1991,19).If, as co nte m po rary cognitive psychology insists, heuristic processing

is "inevitable," then it would be foolish to pretend that heuristics playno pa rt in everyday ju dg m en t an d choice abou t politics in particular.Surely they do. W he th er this is an altogether goo d thing is another m at-ter.First of all, alth ou gh citizens may be q uite w illing to rely on th eviews expressed by be tter-in form ed elites, we should n ot assume that itis always easy for citizens to learn what elites think. In the case of auto-

m obile -insura nce reform in C alifornia, for exam ple (Lupia 1994), theinsurance industry and the trial lawyers understood perfectly well theirreputational problem, so in the millions of dollars' worth of advertise-ments they purchased, they disguised their identity as much as the lawwould allow.We should also keep in mind that heuristics are shortcuts, and thatw he n w e take shortcuts, w e sometimes end u p in the right place butsometimes get lost. In taking cues from elites we can get lost becausethe elites themselves may be mistaken (as in interpreting the Tet offen-sive in 1968 as a catastrophic defeat for U.S . forces), or because elitesknowingly send erroneous cues (as in the Kennedy campaign's chargein i960 that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union inthe pro du ction of offensive nuc lear missiles). T hus , heuristic processing

can lead to erron eou s co nclusions (Kuklinski and Q ui rk 2000; Lau &Redlawsk 2001).This is perfectly obvious to anyone acquainted with the originalwork on heuristics in psychology. In a series of brilliantly conceivedand highly influential experiments, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tver-sky showed that in response to information overload, people use arbi-trary starting points to anch or th eir jud gm en ts; rely on the subjective

accessibility of memories to estimate the frequency and importance ofpast events; depe nd on surface resemblances to place particular instancesin general categories; igno re statistical inform ation; an d ove r-we ightvivid cases of dub ious typicality (Abelson 1976; Tve rsky and K ahn em an1974, 1981; K ahn em an and K netsch 1992; K ahn em an , R i tov , andSchkade 2000; Kahneman and Tversky 1979). In this literature, heuris-tics are described as biases and shortcomings; they generate systematic de-partures from norm ative m odels of ju dg m en t and choice ; they can"lead to severe and systematic errors" (Tversky and Kahneman 1974,1124).




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For some reason or another, political scientists who have taken upthe claim of heuristics have overlooked this basic point. Heuristics aresimply embraced as a normatively appealing remedy for the problem ofinsufficient info rm atio n. B ut as R ic ha rd Lau and Da vid R edla w sk(2001) put it, this is merely a "verbal solutio n."

In the end, the problem for d em ocracy is no t jus t that citizens don 'tknow enough, or that they cannot justify to others what they know. Itis that they know thingsor think they know thingsthat are incor-rect: that the crime rate is rising (when in fact it is declining), or that ahuge fraction of the national treasury is being spent on foreign aid(when it is not), or that weapons of mass destruction have been foundin Iraq (wh en th ey have no t bee n). Such errors of fact can be quiteconsequential for the opinions people hold, and they are not alwayseasy to correc t (Gilens 2 001; Kuklinski, Qu irk, Jerit, Schw eider, andRich 2000).

Finally, neither the claim that citizens know more than they can tell,no r the assertion that und er certain specified con dition s, poo rly i n -formed citizens can mimic the decisions made by the better informed,has any thing to say, really, abo ut the b ru te fact of inform ation ine qu al-ity: m ost peo ple kn ow so little about politics, w hile others k no w somuch .

We Are Not the SamePolitics is a difficult subject, and not everyone cares to study it. Largenum bers of Am ericans kn ow little about political life, but a ha nd -fulthe activists and the fanatics who live and breathe politics (thesort of person who might pick up an issue of Critical Review)ap-pear to know practically everything. Mass publics are characterized byhuge inequalities in political information.Huge inequalities. Co nverse referred to the variation in the c o m -mand of political information displayed by members of the generalpublic as "staggering" and "astronomical," and his analysis of beliefsystems turns on this point. Some people think about politics in so-phisticated w ays, traffic easily in abstrac tion, and p lace c ur rent eventsin con text. T he y are the w ell-informe d few, and they pick up ne winformation easily and retain it readily. Some people spend very littletime on politics, abstract political concepts fly over their heads, andw h e n they thin k a bo ut politics at all, they take up events on e at a




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time, seeing little or no connection among them . They are the know -nothings, they exist in far larger numbers than we imagine, and forthem, news about politics is next to incomprehensible. In betweenthese two extremes are the rest, who get by, paying intermittent at-tention, alert enough to notice temporal associations between theparty in power and conditions in the country or in their own lives,say; or sensible enough to support policies that bestow favors on so-cial groups they find deserving (more on the logic of group-centrismbelow).

In short, citizens vary enormously in the information about poli-tics they have at their command. So Converse claimed in his 1964essay, and so it still seems to be (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996).Phrases like "the general public" or "the average citizen" obscure thisfundamental difference. We are no t all the same.Moreover, since Converse's essay, we have learned that the well in-formed differ from the poorly informed in all kinds of consequential

ways. They are more likely to express opinions in the first place. Theyare more likely to possess stable opinionsreal opinions, opinionsheld with conviction. They are more likely to use ideological con-cepts correctly, to cite evidence in political discussions, and to processinformation sensitively. They are better at retaining new information.They are more adept in the deployment of heuristics. They votemore consistently with their political interests. And they are muchmore likely to take an active part in politics (e.g., Bartels 1988; DelliCarpini and Keeter 1996; Fiske, Lau, and Smith 1990; Fiske andKinder 1981; Gilens 2001; Iyengar 1990; Lau and Redlawsk 2001;Mondak 2001; Price and Zaller 1993; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady1995; Zaller 1990, 1992). Inform ation matters.

Perhaps the single most important application of this principlesince Converse's essay can be found in John Zaller's influential workon the dynamics of public opinion, The Nature and Origins of MassOpinion (1992) .7 The prime mover in Zaller's account of public opin-ion is, broadly speaking, news about the wider world. To explain howthe flow of news affects opinion, Zaller draws on theoretical modelsand empirical results from cognitive psychology. He abandons the tra-ditional conception of political "attitudes" as fixed preferences; in-stead, he views attitudes as constructions, sturdy or rickety, but in anycase built on the fly. W he n asked for their opinions, citizens draw onmental "considerations" that happen to be most accessible at that mo-

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mentconsiderations, as Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske (1978) onceput it, that are at the "top of the head."Taking center stage in ZaUer's model is the proposition that peoplediffer enormously in the care and attention they invest in politics,with this difference manifested by differences in political knowledge.Zaller proposes that differential political knowledge has complicated,offsetting effects on opinion change. On the one hand, people aremore likely to "receive" a message as a direct function of their levelof general information about politics; bu t on the other, they are morelikely to resist messages that are inconsistent with their political pre-dispositions. Zaller's model turns out to fit a wide array of empiricalcases. Shifts in opinion on school desegregation and on the VietnamWar; the dynamics of presidential primary election campaigns; theelectoral advantages enjoyed by Congressional incumbentsall these(and more) can be accommodated within a common theoretical vo-cabulary (Zaller 1992). Inform ation (one last time) matters.

Group-CentrismConverse's essay is best remembered as a relentless and forceful attackon the fanciful idea that citizens in modern mass societies thinkabout politics in ideologically sophisticated ways. The essay is that inpart, but it is no t only that. About midway through, Converse offeredan affirmative statement. If ideological reasoning is beyond most peo-ple's capacity and interest, how might they organize their thinkingabout politics?Converse began to formulate his answer through a thought experi-ment. He invited the reader to imagine policies formulated so as toemphasize a highly visible and familiar social groupin his example,using the vernacular of the times, "Negroes" whose fortunes appearto be advanced or impaired by each of the policies. As in: "Negroesshould be kept out of professional athletics," or "The governmentshould see to it that Negroes get fair treatment in jobs and housing,"or "Even though it may hurt the position of the Negro in the South,state governments should be able to decide who can vote and whocannot." Converse suggested that for most Americans, it is the socialgroup itself that looms large in these various policy proposals, not ab-stract arguments over states' rights or the proper role of the federalgovernment. Because abstractions "take on meaning only with a good




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deal of political information and understanding, the attitude itemsgiven would tend to boil down for many respondents to the samesingle question: 'Are you sympathetic to Negroes as a group, are youindifferent to them , or do you dislike th em ?'" (Converse [1964] 2006,39).In this exercise, Converse was using race to make a general pointabout the potential of sentiments toward social groups to organizepolitical beliefs. The "advantage" of race is that the markers for groupmembership are highly visible"in the skin," so to speak. But Con-verse mentioned religion, social class, and nationality as well as race,and offered the role of John F. Kennedy's Catholicism in the i960presidential campaign as a case in point.If the evidence in support of group-centrism was fragmentarysome 40 years ago, it is now abundant. Across a variety of domains,public opinion is shaped in powerful ways by the feelings citizensharbor toward the social groups that are visibly entangled in the issuesand events of the moment (e.g., Citrin, Reingold, and Green 1990;Dawson 1994; Gilens 1995; Kinder and Sanders 1996; Kinder andW inter 2001; Nelson and Kinder 1996; Price and Hsu 1992; Sears,Hensler, and Speer 1979; Sniderman, Brody, and Kuklinski 1984).Group sentiment is not the only factor in public opinion, but it is al-most always present, and of all the diverse opinion ingredients, it isoften the most potent.

Notice that group-centrism requires that citizens see a connectionbetween some political dispute, on the one hand, and some visible so-cial group, on the other. That is, to get group-centrism up and run-ning, citizens must, as Converse put it, "be endowed with some cog-nitions of the group as an entity and with some interstitial 'linking'information indicating why a given party or policy is relevant to thegrou p. N eith er of these forms of info rm ation can be taken forgranted" (Converse [1964] 2006, 41). Thus group-centrism dependsupon information, and can be short-circuited by the kinds of infor-mational shortcomings that show up routinely in public opinion re-search.

These gaps in public understanding are partly a product of thelimited attention and modest skills that citizens typically bring to pol-itics. But the extent to which citizens are in possession of informa-tion linking a particular group with a particular proposal may also de -pend on what is happening in politics: on the nature of the issues that

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happen to be momentarily salient, and on how such issues are framed(Kinder and Sanders 1996; Nelson and Kinder 1996).

Smart Publics?In recent years opinion research has taken a turn from the individuallevel of analysis to the aggregate. Serious attention is now being de-voted to public opinion as a whole, to collective judgment and choice.The focus is no longer exclusively on citizens and votersConverse'sprincipal preoccupationsbut on publics and electorates as well.This shift in perspective is welcome: it is, after all, public opinion inthe aggregate that shapes government. W hat, then, can we say aboutcollective competence: the capacity of the public considered as wholeprovide wise decisions, good judgment, and sensible advice? If, as theevidence indicates overwhelmingly, individual citizens are on averageignorant, can the public as a whole be well informed?Aristotle's answer to this question was yes: for "w here there aremany people, each has some share of goodness and intelligence, andwhen these are brought together, they become as it were one multi-ple man with many pairs of feet and hands and many minds" (1962,123). To the very same question,Walter Lippmann's answer was no: inThe Phantom Public, Lippmann (1925, 39) expressed exasperation with"mystical democrats" who placed their faith in the "unattainableideal" of democracy, "the com pounding of individual ignorance inmasses of people."

Recent analysis of aggregate public opinionof public opinionwrit largesuggests that neither Aristotle nor Lippmann had thestory completely right. It is complicated, as social scientists are fondof saying.Consider ideological sophistication. We have known since C on-verse that the typical voter is bewildered by ideological terminology.But the typical electorate is (or seems to be) ideologically discriminat-ing. Suppose we ask a sample of American voters to place a set ofnationally prominent political figures on an ideological continuum,from very liberal to very conservative. Scott Feld and Bernard Grof-man (1988) have shown that, simply averaging across all voters, the

electorate as a whole places candidates exactly congruent with thecorrect ideological ordering, despite the fact that a large fraction ofthe voters who constitute the electorate offer judgments that, taken




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individually, are ideologically incoherent. Converse and Roy Pierce(1986) supply a similar example from their analysis of political repre-sen tation in Fra nce . T h e Fren ch are, on average, nearly as igno ran tand confused abo ut ideology as are their Am erican cou nterpa rts. Yetthe French public, taken as a whole, can locate the entire gamut ofFrench political parties from left to right with near perfect accuracy.

Very much the same point is made by research on the dynamics ofaggregate public opinion. This work takes up a variety of subjects:change over time in the public's assessment of a president's perfor-m anc e (Erikson, M acK ue n, and Stim son 2002); poli t ical p r ior i t ies(Hibb s 1979; Iyengar an d Kin de r 1987); po licy preferences (Page andShap iro 1992; Stim son 20 04); votes (R os en sto ne 1983); and m ore .T im e and again, public o pin ion in the aggregate emerges in this liter-ature as responsive to social, economic, and political changeoftenexquisitely so. V iew ed from this vantage po in t, collective pub lic o pi n -io n look s sensible, well inform ed, pe rhaps even, as Ben jam in Page a ndR o b e rt Shapiro (1992) wo uld have it , "rational."

R ec on ciling "ration al" publics w ith Converse's portrayal of th e aver-age citizen is easier than it might at first seem. Publics are smarter thancitizens , o n average, becau se th e e rrors and confusions of individualscancel out in the calculation of the public's opinion. This is the "mira-cle of aggregation," the law of large numbers applied to public opin-ion. Averaging the views of large numbers of individuals, clear signalscan em erge from w ha t is largely a "sea of n oise" (Converse 1990, 382).These signals may be determined disproportionately by the relativelysmall number of citizens who are paying close attention to politics.James Stimson (1991, 125) suggests that alterations in the Americanpublic's preference for more or less government are "driven largely bythe leadership elements in the public. W he re the inattentive and un in -formed behave unpredictably, and therefore cancel out one another, thesystematic behavior arises from those responding to the events of thereal world." Converse (1990, 382) makes the same point, writing that "itis quite possible, thanks to the hidden power of aggregation, to arriveat a highly rational system performance on the backs of voters most ofwhom are remarkably ill informed much of the time." 8

The miracle of aggregation is reliable. It does not require specialins titu tio na l design o r pa rticu lar c ultura l values; it can always beco un te d on (Conv erse 1990). Sm art publics, on e c ould say, are in -evitable.9

Well, not quite inevitable, and here is where Lippmann's skepticism




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has its place . W h a t if th e e rro r and confusion of ord inary citizens issystematic rather than random, structured by deliberate programs ofmisinformation, cynical television advertisements, appeals to racism,and the like? Indeed, Page and Shapiro (1992) provide several com-pelling casessuch as th e fabricated "m issile ga p" that h elpe d carryKe nnedy into the W hite H ou se in w hich the public was led off inthe wrong direction.

Fur thermore, there is now s t rong suggest ive evidence that thejudgment of the public as a whole deviates sizably and systematicallyfrom the ju dg m en t the public w ould have rendered had it be en w ellinform ed. F or exam ple, Larry Bartels (1996) has show n tha t in re centA m erican presidential elections, poorly inform ed voters make d ec i-sions differently tha n do we ll-in form ed vote rs: the y draw on differentconsiderations, in different prop ortion s. M oreover, w he n Bartels im -pu tes "fully in fo rm ed " cho ices to all vote rs (that is, the cho ices vo terswould have made had they been well informed), he discovers sub-stantial differences between the electorate's actual choice and its hy-poth etica l fully in form ed cho ice. T h e same appears to be true forpublic op inio n generally (Althaus 2003). So if w e cou ld som eh owerase inform ation inequality, br ing ing everyone up to th e same h ighlevel, we w ou ld have created a public that w ou ld m ake different de ci -sions, reach different judgments, and offer different advice than thepub lic w e actually o bserve. Fro m this perspective, to o, the publicseems not to be as intelligent as democratic theory would like it tobe.

Finally, miracle-of-aggrega tion accou nts of the publics wisdom ig-nore the extraordinary diversity that characterizes modern mass publics,which Converse's analysis did so much to highlight. Sometimes there isa price to be paid for analysis carried on at such a high level of aggre-gation. For example, in their s tudy of macropart isanship, MichaelM acK uen , R o b ert Erikso n, and James Stimson (1989) focus entirely ondescribing and explaining net swings in the national balance of partyloyalty. Th is is a valuable perspective, bu t it is oblivious to oth er kinds ofchange that become visible at lower levels of aggregation. A nation-centered account has nothing to say about the realignment in party loy-alties in the American South, organized by race and precipitated by thepolarizing presidential campaign of 1964 and the controversial VotingR igh ts Act passed a year later. Black Am ericans m oved in to th e D e m o -cratic party, wh ile So uthern whites moved out. This am oun ted to a po -litical change of historic proportions, a fundamental transformation in




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Kinder Belief Systems Tod ay 213

the landscape of Southern politics. But from the perspective of nationalpartisanship, these largely offsetting trends were undetectable (Black andBlack 1992; Carmines and Stimson 1989; Green, Palmquist, andSchlickler 2002; Kinder and Sanders 1996).The point here is not that any one level of aggregation is best; it israther to emphasize that a particular level of aggregation equips us bothto see some things clearly and to see others badly or not at all. If wewish to understand public opinion, we need to understand it in thelarge and in the small.

Converse and BeyondAt about the time Converse was putting the finishing touches on"T he Nature of Belief Systems," Jerome Bruner, Fritz Heider, H er-bert Simon, and their comrades were hatching a cognitive revolutionin psychology. Research on mental models and the architecture ofmind exploded; some of this work, as we've seen, made its way to thestudy of public opinion. The more of this, the better.Not that this borrowing will always result in simple and straight-forward advances. Some of what cognitive research reveals may t rou-ble the entire enterprise. Framing effects, preference reversals, an-choring and adjustment biases, sweeping concretization, accessibilitybias: these deviations from rationality axioms are systematic; they areakin to psychological laws; they stubbornly resist correction. Bartels(2003, 49) concludes from these results that political attitudes are in-sufficient "to serve as a satisfactory starting point for democratictheory."I suggested earlier that public opinion is susceptible to elite fram-ing, and from one point of view at least, this is a good thing. W henprovided helpful frames, citizens are more likely to find their way to areal opinion . But as Bartels points out, from the perspective of dem o-cratic theory, the problem is how to decide which frames are desir-able. There is no neutral way to p ut a question. Policy proposal are al-ways framed in particular ways. W ho is to say which frames lead to"enlightened" opinions? In the absence of a coherent normative ac-count of what makes one frame more appropriate than another as abasis for dem ocratic choice, "political debate and policy choice canonly be thought of as a rhetorical free-for-all, a practical art inwhich at bestthe ends justify the means" (Bartels 2003, 68).




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There is, I think, a still larger point lurking in Bartels's complaint.As we have seen here, information matters to public opinion in allsorts of ways, bu t we have much yet to learn about how informationis created and disseminated. We need theorizing and systematic em -pirical work that makes connections between the "information sys-tem," on the one hand, and the decisions, judgm ents, and advice ofcitizens, on the other.

By any reasonable standard, Americans are affluent, well educated,and virtually swimming in news of politics. And yet despite these ad-vantages, most Americans glance at the political world mystified by itsabstractions and ignorant of its particulars. So it was, according toConverse, nearly a half century ago, and so, by and large, it remainstoday.That Converse's conclusions have generally stood up well to thetest of time should not be taken to mean that most people follow nopolitical logic at all. Ideological principles are too abstract and too de-manding for most of us, but we manage to muddle through never-theless, at least in part by relying on group-centrism, simplifyingcomplex questions of public policy by turning them into judgmentson the deservingness of the groups involved. This makes for reason-ably intelligible and modestly structured opinions.10 Likewise, thatConverse's analysis is by and large sustained does not mean thatAmericans are typically empty-headed when it comes to politics.They are not, as Ro ber t Lane (1962), Jennifer Hochschild (1981), andFeldman and Zaller (1992), among others, have shown. But their po-litical ideas defy parsimonious description. Some are liberal, othersconservative. Some political views are authentic and tenaciously held;others are nonattitudes, casually expressed or made up on the spot;and the rest are subject to manipulation and reversal, as well as to ed-ucation. There are veins of knowledge, much confusion, and vast ex-panses of ignorance.

For now at least, the final word still belongs to Converse ([1964]2006, 54): "A realistic picture of political belief systems in the masspublic, then, is not one that omits issues and policy demands com-pletely nor one that presumes widespread ideological coherence; it israther one that captures with some fidelity the fragmentation, nar-rowness, and diversity of these dem ands."




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NOTES1. For a timequite a long timeit seemed that the commotion would neverend. At the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in

1982, I presented a paper un der the title "E no ug h Already about Ideology." Ithad no effect: the avalanche of papers and books dedicated to determiningwhether Converse had got the story right continued unabated.2. Elsewhere I have provided reviews of the evidence justifying this conclusion(Kinder 1983 and 1998). I seem to be tou gh er o n Converse's critics thanConverse (1975) himself is inclined to be .3. But how should all this attitudinal wandering be interpreted? Converse took

instability to signal the flimsiness of public opinion. Reluctant to admit theirow n ignorance, peop le invented evanescent op inions: liberal on one occa -sion, conservative on the next. Others have interpreted instability to be a re-flection of imperfections in attitude measurement. From this perspective, in-stability reflects vague and confused questions, not vague and confusedcitizens. Th is is the position taken by Achen 1975, which drew for its analysison the same national panel study that provided the raw materials for Con-verse's claim of non-attitudes. Capitalizing on the statistical opportunitiesprovided by opinion measurement at three points in time, Achen correctedConverse's over-time correlations for the attenuation associated with mea-surement error, on the presumption that all of the error properly belongedto the instrument. Following these corrections, the over-time correlations in-creased dramatically. By Achen's calculations, all of the instability in responsewas due to measurement error; opinion itself was perfectly stable.A more plausible starting assumption seems to me that instability was a

product of imperfections in both instrumentation and in citizens, particularlygiven the ir low levels of inform ation (Converse [1964] 2006 and 1970). Ifthis is right, then opinion stability should be predictable from how much cit-izens know and it is (Feldman 1989). An d if this is right, then w hen que s-tions used to assess opinions on policy are improved, stability should in-creaseand this turns out to be true, too (e.g., Krosnick and Berent 1993).4. For o ther examples of framing effects in political com munication, see Jacoby

2000 and Nelson, Oxley, and Clawson 1997. Framing effects are issue specific;they have to do with the development of real opinions on particular matters,no t the generation of panoramic belief systems or broad ideologies. These ef-fects can be erased when the alternative frames are attributed to ludicroussources (Jerry Springer on government programs for the poor, or the NationalEnquirer on constitutional protection of hate speech); when frame recipients areinduced to talk to others recently armed with opposing frames (Druckman2001; Druckm an and N elson 2003); and when frames are presented simultane-ously with their transparently logically equivalent opposites (Druckman 2004).

5. This claim is in fact widely shared among psychologists: that strong attitudesalso know n as important, central, or accessible attitudes motivate action, wh ile

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weak attitudes do n ot (e.g., Eagley and C haiken 1998; Petty and Krosnick1995). It is Converses view as well:Presented with an individual holding some positive or negative disposi-tion toward an attitude object, the first thing we wan t to ask is wh ethe rthe attitude is held w ith overpow ering conviction, is merely some pass-ing fancy, or lies som ewh ere in betw een . . . . Both high the ory andcommon sense converge to say that a strong attitude is one that willendure, will resist attempts at persuasion in contrary directions, willexert influence on the formation of related perceptions and beliefs,andperhaps most importantwill predict behavioral decisions withhighest fidelity. (Converse 1995, xi.)

6. From a certain po int of view, such igno rance is rational. As An thony D ow nsfamously argued in An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), the re are costs a t-tached to the procurement and analysis of political informationmeasuredin time, energy, and opportunities foregoneand purely rational voters willpay such costs only insofar as the information promises a return. But in alarge electorate, one person's vote is "lost in a sea of votes," and so the inst ru-mental benefits from an enlightened vote are infinitesimal. The result, ac-cording to D ow ns, is "rational ignorance."7. Zaller acknowledges his intellectual debt to Converse in the preface to TheNature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992, xi) .8. Many economists adopt a similar explanation for the relative efficiency of fi-nancial markets. Market efficiency comes from decisions made by a relativelysmall number of rational and foresighted investors (the "marginal trader").Most investors are ill informed, irrational, or both, and their decisions arepoorbut they tend to cancel (e.g., Forsythe, Nelson, Neumann, and Wright1992).

9. There are at least two other accounts of the "rationality" of the collective.O ne is from Page and Shapiro (1992), w ho offer an inspiring story ab out thedivision of political labor and the circulation of ideas and informationthrough society. But thus far it is only a story, and not a very persuasive one,in that it presumes adequate communication across long chains of citizens,most of whom have little interest in, and even less information about, thepolitical topic that is supposed to be in circulation. The second is the appli-cation of Condorcet's ju ry theo rem (Miller 1986), which indicates an aggre -gation gain w he n (1) all juro rs have at least a reasonable and equal chance ofbein g corre ct (that is, vo ting for the alternative that w ou ld be preferredunder conditions of co mplete information); and (2) all juro rs decide ind e-pendently. But if the average voter is wandering around in the dark, and ifvoters vary considerably in the likelihood that they will vote "correctly," thenaggregation may actually makes things worse, no t bette r (Bartels 1996).

10. Though we should keep in mind that some of the sentiments that may besupplying the intelligibility and structureanti-Semitism, racism, and the




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Belief Systems Today

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